The Dark Energy Camera is a new imager with a 2°. 2 diameter field of view mounted at the prime focus of the Victor M. Blanco 4m telescope on Cerro Tololo near La Serena, Chile. The camera was designed and constructed by the Dark Energy Survey Collaborationand meets or exceeds the stringent requirements designed for the widefield and supernova surveys for which the collaboration uses it. The camera consists of a five-element optical corrector, seven filters, a shutter with a 60 cm aperture, and a charge-coupled device (CCD) focal plane of 250 μm thick fully depleted CCDs cooled inside a vacuum Dewar. The 570 megapixel focal plane comprises 62 2k × 4k CCDs for imaging and 12 2k × 2k CCDs for guiding and focus. The CCDs have 15 μm × 15 μm pixels with a plate scale of 0 263 pixel −1. A hexapod system provides state-of-the-art focus and alignment capability. The camera is read out in 20 s with 6-9 electronreadout noise. This paper provides a technical description of the cameraʼs engineering, construction, installation, and current status.

Abstract-Charge-coupled devices (CCD's) have been fabricated on high-resistivity, n-type silicon. The resistivity, on the order of 10,000 Ω-cm, allows for depletion depths of several hundred microns. Fully-depleted, back-illuminated operation is achieved by the application of a bias voltage to a ohmic contact on the wafer back side consisting of a thin in-situ doped polycrystalline silicon layer capped by indium tin oxide and silicon dioxide. This thin contact allows for good short wavelength response, while the relatively large depleted thickness results in good near-infrared response.

Six samples of ultra-pure (|N/\-Nrj|<_ lO^cm-^}, single-crystal germanium have been neutron transmutation doped with neutron doses between 7.5 x lO* 6 and 1.88 x 10l 8 cnr 2. After thermal annealing at 400°C for six hours in a pure argon atmosphere, the samples have been characterized with Hall effect and resistivity measurements between 300 and 0.3 K. Our results show that the resistivity in the low temperature, hopping conduction regime can be approximated with P = p 0 exp(A/T). The three more heavily doped samples show values

Abstract-P-channel, backside illuminated silicon CCDs were developed and fabricated on high-resistivity n-type silicon. Devices have been exposed up to 1 × 10 11 protons/cm 2 at 12 MeV. The charge transfer efficiency and dark curent were measured as a function of radiation dose. These CCDs were found to be significantly more radiation tolerant than conventional n-channel devices. This could prove to be a major benefit for long duration space missions.